None of those were his ideas, and LEO satellite internet is just making it so ground based, reliable fiber projects get canned. All so people can use horrible internet. We should be funding public LUDs and fiber, not bandaiding the issue with a half baked solution that causes tons of pollution
Ehhhhhh is it? The costs of it are immense, and the market for it really isn’t. Starlink is being hugely subsidised, and the cost of maintaining the network hasn’t fully come into play yet. Due to orbital decay, the sats coming back down after a few years when they run out of fuel, Starlink will run into the red queen paradox in about 18 months to 2 years. That’s where they need to run as fast as they can, just to stay in the same place. Every new stattelite will be a direct replacement.
And currently, Starlink is NOT profitable. They’re reporting a profit, but that’s a bookkeeping trick. They’re putting up new satellites as an investment, when a fair chunk of them are just operating costs. Eventually, their total “growth investment” will be operating costs, it will be a mandatory expense.
Starlink inherently scales very poorly. If you want to add 1 extra connection in a city with 20 million people, you need to add 1 extra connection for every spot on the entire planet, and the planet is mostly water without anyone using the network. So we have a network that can’t grow in places where people live, competing with vastly cheaper alternatives that have vastly lower upkeep costs.
**Just a little breakdown of their finances: **
They made 8.1 billion in 2024. That includes 2b in government contracts, and 1.97 (call it 2b) in hardware sales and accesories. So that’s 4.1b in subscribtions.
They launched 1923 satellites . That means they will HAVE TO launch 1923 sats to keep up the network. Let’s believe their best estimate and say each v1 sat one costs 250k and each v2 mini costs 750k (estimate, it’s tripple the size of a v1, ignoring inflation and tariffs entirely), and that each launch is 30m, half of what they charge externally (probably much higher, but eh).
So, with 4.1b income, they’re spending 3.5b just on maintaining the orbital network at the absolute most optimistic pricing, leaving 600 million. They employ about 750 people, lets say those each cost 150k (meaning they earn ~75k, which is a bargain!), down to 485m. Just the power use alone of groundstations alone (4m users times 20 watts at 5 cents per kWh) is another 35m, and that’s probably hugely underestimating it.
Out of that remaining 450m they have to pay for their ground equipment and infrastructure, their offices and cars and executives, and of course a fuckton of data. And these numbers are all hugely kind to SpaceX. And of course, none of this includes interest payments. Lets say they actually turned a 100m profit on a 4b expense. That’s 2.5%.
You might as well open a supermarket. Hell, I can make a 2.5% profit just by putting money into my savingsaccount. I can make a 6% by buying S&P500 ETFs. That’s the kind of longterm profit you’re looking at from running Starlink.
In almost all cases of Elon having one of his companies do something good, he was more of a hindrance than a help.
“Starship doesn’t need a deluge system”
“Put the charge port on the left hand rear, because that works better for the garage of the place I’m renting in Bel Air” (Yes, really)
SpaceX is his most successful company, and it’s also the one that’s best at keeping Elon away from anything that matters.
LEO Internet satellites aren’t a good idea. They’re threatening Kessler Syndrome and fucking up radio telescopes. It’s also convincing other spacefaring nations that they also need LEO Internet satellites, and that’s only going to make those problems worse. Just lay fiber.
Then there’s the Boring Company. “Digging is easy, you just need to ignore environmental regulations and everything will get done quickly and within budget”, Elon thinks. Well, he did ignore environmental regulations, but it didn’t get done quickly or within budget. The Las Vegas Loop is a low throughput novelty (so perfect for Vegas, I guess). Any moron can increase the capacity of the system by orders of magnitude just by putting some rails in those tunnels.
Are the starlink satellites threatening Kessler syndrome? I thought they were so low it’s not a significant issue. Sounds like the more pressing issue is how quickly they deorbit and how bad they are light pollution wise. Idk though I could just be ignorant on the topic; happy to learn more about it.
Curious about why the charger location was an issue too.
There are several effects of Kessler Syndrome. The one people focus on is the worst one where there’s so much junk that we can’t safely get anything past that orbit for decades or even centuries. That won’t happen in LEO, because, as you say, stuff will come down with the bit of atmospheric drag at that height.
Which doesn’t solve the other issue, which is destroying everything in LEO right now. Astronauts would likely die.
The charger location is what’s forcing Model S owners to back into supercharger parking spaces. Everyone else was inconvenienced for Elon’s benefit.
Also, its been observed that pieces colliding together can be thrown into a higher orbit. Or more accurately, a more elliptic orbit with a much higher apogee than it had before. That means a Kessler Syndrome event in a lower orbit could start a chain reaction in higher orbits.
Also immediately obvious was the high
susceptibility of the fragment to solar radiation
pressure, demonstrated by rapid and dramatic
changes in its orbit. From an initial orbit of
about 1365 km by 1445 km with an inclination
of 74 degrees, the fragment’s perigee began to
decrease while its apogee increased. Within
four weeks the orbit had been perturbed into
one of 750 km by 1895 km. At this point,
atmospheric drag became the dominant factor,
causing the object to reenter the atmosphere a
little more than two weeks later on 3 June (see
figure). Thus, the fragment existed for only 43
days, despite originating in an orbit from which
decay normally requires thousands of years.
Good news is that they won’t last very long in orbit doing since the perigee is lowered. However, having so many fragments all at once would probably be very bad.
This was already known, but NASA going through the test phase that involved rockets exploding get very different public push back compared to a private company using government money to do the same thing.
, LEO satellite Internet being worthwhile,
Already known, but the negative side effects that starlink ignores were the reason that didn’t take off.
electric cars being a thing.
Electric cars were already a thing. My dad had a home made prototype one based on regular old car batteries with a very limited range in the 80s. What needed to catch up was battery tech, and Tesla was already an electric car company before Musk took over so his involvement has been to get government subsidies for the company to ‘innovate’ by ignoring laws and make shitty decision like hidden handles or limiting teslas fancy cruise control to cameras that gets people killed.
Other than securing government funding to prop those companies up he hasn’t positively contributed to any of those things. All of his other decisions are wrong and he is a dumbass on the technical side who was born into money and knows how to influence people.
I’m not sure I’d call LEO satellite benefits already known and dismiss them like that.
People were calling Starlink an impossible business model for years and years and years… but it was the first one to actually succeed, and provide a rather good service actually.
If you’ve used Starlink because there are no better options then you would understand just how good it is for filling in the Internet coverage gaps that will always exist to some extent
Think they’re saying he popularized them, which I do think he at least contributed to their popularity today. He also contributed to nobody wanting to buy a Nazi car, so there’s that on the other hand.
Exactly the kind of response I expected, one that misunderstands all of the above while putting Elon on an underserved pedestal.
Using public funds to privatize space has not been good or helpful, others have broken down what a disaster his LEO internet satellites have been, and I’m not even sure what you mean by ‘electric cars being a thing’ but buying founders rights to an electric car company and making them a high priced luxury brand has only stifled the adoption of electric cars.
Well, reusable rockets are worth it, LEO satellite Internet being worthwhile, electric cars being a thing.
Stuft like that
None of those were his ideas, and LEO satellite internet is just making it so ground based, reliable fiber projects get canned. All so people can use horrible internet. We should be funding public LUDs and fiber, not bandaiding the issue with a half baked solution that causes tons of pollution
Ehhhhhh is it? The costs of it are immense, and the market for it really isn’t. Starlink is being hugely subsidised, and the cost of maintaining the network hasn’t fully come into play yet. Due to orbital decay, the sats coming back down after a few years when they run out of fuel, Starlink will run into the red queen paradox in about 18 months to 2 years. That’s where they need to run as fast as they can, just to stay in the same place. Every new stattelite will be a direct replacement.
And currently, Starlink is NOT profitable. They’re reporting a profit, but that’s a bookkeeping trick. They’re putting up new satellites as an investment, when a fair chunk of them are just operating costs. Eventually, their total “growth investment” will be operating costs, it will be a mandatory expense.
Starlink inherently scales very poorly. If you want to add 1 extra connection in a city with 20 million people, you need to add 1 extra connection for every spot on the entire planet, and the planet is mostly water without anyone using the network. So we have a network that can’t grow in places where people live, competing with vastly cheaper alternatives that have vastly lower upkeep costs.
**Just a little breakdown of their finances: **
They made 8.1 billion in 2024. That includes 2b in government contracts, and 1.97 (call it 2b) in hardware sales and accesories. So that’s 4.1b in subscribtions.
They launched 1923 satellites . That means they will HAVE TO launch 1923 sats to keep up the network. Let’s believe their best estimate and say each v1 sat one costs 250k and each v2 mini costs 750k (estimate, it’s tripple the size of a v1, ignoring inflation and tariffs entirely), and that each launch is 30m, half of what they charge externally (probably much higher, but eh).
So, with 4.1b income, they’re spending 3.5b just on maintaining the orbital network at the absolute most optimistic pricing, leaving 600 million. They employ about 750 people, lets say those each cost 150k (meaning they earn ~75k, which is a bargain!), down to 485m. Just the power use alone of groundstations alone (4m users times 20 watts at 5 cents per kWh) is another 35m, and that’s probably hugely underestimating it.
Out of that remaining 450m they have to pay for their ground equipment and infrastructure, their offices and cars and executives, and of course a fuckton of data. And these numbers are all hugely kind to SpaceX. And of course, none of this includes interest payments. Lets say they actually turned a 100m profit on a 4b expense. That’s 2.5%.
You might as well open a supermarket. Hell, I can make a 2.5% profit just by putting money into my savingsaccount. I can make a 6% by buying S&P500 ETFs. That’s the kind of longterm profit you’re looking at from running Starlink.
The objective of Starlink is literally to prevent people from seeing stars.
How dare you imply Elon Musk did anything worthwhile!!!
Not even that though, just that his opinions are not always wrong, and his investments sometimes right
In almost all cases of Elon having one of his companies do something good, he was more of a hindrance than a help.
“Starship doesn’t need a deluge system”
“Put the charge port on the left hand rear, because that works better for the garage of the place I’m renting in Bel Air” (Yes, really)
SpaceX is his most successful company, and it’s also the one that’s best at keeping Elon away from anything that matters.
LEO Internet satellites aren’t a good idea. They’re threatening Kessler Syndrome and fucking up radio telescopes. It’s also convincing other spacefaring nations that they also need LEO Internet satellites, and that’s only going to make those problems worse. Just lay fiber.
Then there’s the Boring Company. “Digging is easy, you just need to ignore environmental regulations and everything will get done quickly and within budget”, Elon thinks. Well, he did ignore environmental regulations, but it didn’t get done quickly or within budget. The Las Vegas Loop is a low throughput novelty (so perfect for Vegas, I guess). Any moron can increase the capacity of the system by orders of magnitude just by putting some rails in those tunnels.
Are the starlink satellites threatening Kessler syndrome? I thought they were so low it’s not a significant issue. Sounds like the more pressing issue is how quickly they deorbit and how bad they are light pollution wise. Idk though I could just be ignorant on the topic; happy to learn more about it.
Curious about why the charger location was an issue too.
There are several effects of Kessler Syndrome. The one people focus on is the worst one where there’s so much junk that we can’t safely get anything past that orbit for decades or even centuries. That won’t happen in LEO, because, as you say, stuff will come down with the bit of atmospheric drag at that height.
Which doesn’t solve the other issue, which is destroying everything in LEO right now. Astronauts would likely die.
The charger location is what’s forcing Model S owners to back into supercharger parking spaces. Everyone else was inconvenienced for Elon’s benefit.
I thought I remembered reading that the starlink satellites are at a lower altitude than the ISS but I do see now that’s not the case. Thanks
Also, its been observed that pieces colliding together can be thrown into a higher orbit. Or more accurately, a more elliptic orbit with a much higher apogee than it had before. That means a Kessler Syndrome event in a lower orbit could start a chain reaction in higher orbits.
https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/pdfs/ODQNv7i3.pdf
Good news is that they won’t last very long in orbit doing since the perigee is lowered. However, having so many fragments all at once would probably be very bad.
This was already known, but NASA going through the test phase that involved rockets exploding get very different public push back compared to a private company using government money to do the same thing.
Already known, but the negative side effects that starlink ignores were the reason that didn’t take off.
Electric cars were already a thing. My dad had a home made prototype one based on regular old car batteries with a very limited range in the 80s. What needed to catch up was battery tech, and Tesla was already an electric car company before Musk took over so his involvement has been to get government subsidies for the company to ‘innovate’ by ignoring laws and make shitty decision like hidden handles or limiting teslas fancy cruise control to cameras that gets people killed.
Other than securing government funding to prop those companies up he hasn’t positively contributed to any of those things. All of his other decisions are wrong and he is a dumbass on the technical side who was born into money and knows how to influence people.
I’m not sure I’d call LEO satellite benefits already known and dismiss them like that.
People were calling Starlink an impossible business model for years and years and years… but it was the first one to actually succeed, and provide a rather good service actually.
If you’ve used Starlink because there are no better options then you would understand just how good it is for filling in the Internet coverage gaps that will always exist to some extent
What ? Are you saying he invented electric cars ?
Think they’re saying he popularized them, which I do think he at least contributed to their popularity today. He also contributed to nobody wanting to buy a Nazi car, so there’s that on the other hand.
Exactly the kind of response I expected, one that misunderstands all of the above while putting Elon on an underserved pedestal.
Using public funds to privatize space has not been good or helpful, others have broken down what a disaster his LEO internet satellites have been, and I’m not even sure what you mean by ‘electric cars being a thing’ but buying founders rights to an electric car company and making them a high priced luxury brand has only stifled the adoption of electric cars.
And that’s also not what I asked.